


If you forget me

by amberfox17



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Amnesia, Identity Issues, M/M, Memory Loss, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-25
Updated: 2014-05-25
Packaged: 2018-01-26 11:39:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1686977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amberfox17/pseuds/amberfox17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His house is small, with a door in each side: north, south, east and west. It is made exactly for one, with one long, narrow bed, one wide, comfortable chair, one perfectly circular table with just one stool. He has one bowl, one cup, one plate, one fork and one spoon.</p><p>He does not notice the lack of a knife for a very long time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If you forget me

His house is small, with a door in each side: north, south, east and west. It is made exactly for one, with one long, narrow bed, one wide, comfortable chair, one perfectly circular table with just one stool. He has one bowl, one cup, one plate, one fork and one spoon.

He does not notice the lack of a knife for a very long time.

*

His house is perched halfway up a hill, overlooking a pebbled bay. The cliffs are high and sheer and the grass cropped close by rabbits who crouch in the tangled gorse and watch him with dark, nervous eyes when he passes. A cacophony of seabirds soar overhead, raucous and lively and far beyond his reach: dusty grey kittiwakes, smart liveried razorbills, fearless herring gulls, sickle-winged gannets, red-beaked choughs, ancient cormorants and silent, serene albatross. They are joined by swooping starlings and tiny darting sparrows, bright-breasted robins and strutting wagtails, industrious mistle-thrush and trilling blackbirds, and he loves most of all to sit on his small balcony cradling his bitter tea and watch their joyous, unbound flight.

He does not know why, but he finds himself looking for a pair of ravens, for their stabbing beaks and shadowed wings, their dry, ominous coughs.

He never sees any and it always makes him smile.

*

He walks, sometimes for minutes, sometimes for hours, along the winding cliff-top path, careful to avoid the crumbling edge and its siren’s call. He hears the sea, always, a dull, muted roar or a seductive, silky whispering, its depths so inviting, shifting from azure blue to shimmering green to an elegant slate grey. The sea is always hungry, always restless, always waging its merciless war, eating away at the soft limestone cliffs, swallowing up their honey-coloured stone and pounding angrily against the jagged rocks at their base. He looks at the clouds, the sky, the far distant soft-smudged horizon.

He never goes down to the beach and he never looks to the sea.

*

He walks one day much further than he has ever walked before, lungs and limbs burning, face stinging from the wind and the sun, lips dry and throat parched. The cliffs go on and on and on, an endless winding path, hemmed in by gorse and thorns and briar. There are green fields in the distance, on the landward side, and copses of trees, cool, emerald woods – but he cannot see how to reach them, and he sees no houses, no outbuildings, no people of any kind.

He finds it comforting and terrifying in the same breath and he immediately turns back.

*

The next day, he walks again, in the opposite direction, skirting the treacherous shifting shale of the beach to ascend the opposite cliff, already strangely certain of what he will find. Sure enough, the path snakes out, without branch or break or sign of human life. He walks on anyway, face tilted up, until the sun begins to fade, and then he turns for home. But he has miscalculated, and he is not yet at his house by the time the last bloody rays soak into the surface of the sea.

Darkness rises around him.

It is warm and velvety and he finds he does not mind it overmuch; there is only one path, after all, and as the stars awaken, he finds he has enough light to see his way. He keeps his gaze high and as he walks, he sketches the familiar shapes in the sky: the Great Bear, Orion’s Belt, Cassiopeia, Sirius, the Dog Star, Polaris, the North Star, the still point on which the cosmic wheel rotates –

His gorge rises and a terrible, blinding pain seizes his skull; there is a band of white-hot agony wrapped around his temples, squeezing, tightening, and he falls to his knees and howls, scrabbling helplessly at his head, only vaguely aware that he vomits, eyes wide and staring and fixed on the star-studded vastness overhead, suddenly, nauseously _wrong_. These are not the stars of home, not the constellations he knows. Where is the Ancient of Days, the beacon over the city centre? Where is the Lifegiver, the Primordial Cow, the Horns, the Skull, the First Father?

Where is the Tree, with stellar nurseries cradled in her branches? Where are the blooms of cosmic dust and the bright trails of endless falling stars as they slide down the sky from leaf-top to root, their fiery death-throes sparking against the gold of the city, the Observatory, their frozen tails carving through the rainbow brilliance reflected from the bridge?

_Where is he?_

Vertigo seizes him and he is falling, falling, stomach roiling as the world tilts and falls away, and his skull is surely going to burst open like a rotten egg, and he is falling, falling, a thin scream echoing in his ears, forced from between his lungs and he is falling -

*

He wakes suddenly and only then realises he has slept. He is cold and twisted into an uncomfortable tangle and there is a pool of vomit next to his head, all desperately unpleasant and unwelcome. He unwinds himself and stretches, moving gingerly as a fresh bloom of pain erupts behind his eyes. He is cold and afraid and alone.

As soon as he can, he limps home, eyes fixed on the rutted track beneath his feet, and once there, he closes all his doors and covers all his windows. He huddles before the fire, shivering despite his heavy blanket, sitting so close the ends of his hair are sizzling. The cold has burrowed into his bones, hollowed them out, filled his veins with ice; he holds his hand out to the fire, half-sure it is turning blue, the very thought setting his teeth on edge, though he knows not why.

His hand remains bone-white and trembling, even when he dips his fingertips to the flame and watches them blister and crack in the heat.

He cannot get warm.

*

He remains inside for a long time.

*

There is a storm coming.

He stands in his kitchen and watches it build, the heavy black clouds crowding the horizon filling him with unease. They roll in over the water, as black as ravens’ wings, and they drive before the squalling rain, which batters itself against his windows, the wind howling a lament and promising sudden, bitter fury. He holds himself still for the lightning strike, teeth clenched, breath held tightly in his aching chest, but when the thunder booms he yelps and flinches.

He draws the curtains and crawls back into bed, quaking as the storm sweeps over the cliffs and unleashes its fury against his small, solitary house.

*

He hears his door bang open but before he can extricate himself from his blanket nest he feels the hands upon him and begins to scream. He is dragged from his bed and unceremoniously dumped on the floor, where he cowers at the foot of a huge man, clothed in leather and metal and wielding a truly enormous hammer. The tang of ozone is heavy in the air and the man’s eyes crackle with the lightning that flares outside.

The man is saying something, but he cannot make it out over the raging storm and the hammering of his own heart. He cannot understand the man’s words, and tries to frame the words to say so, but he is afraid, so afraid, and his body betrays him: tears are dripping from his cheeks and he can only mewl in terror and kick frantically, trying to scramble away to the faint safety of his bedframe.

The man advances on him in a few quick steps and hurls the bed aside, shouting something, but his voice is indistinguishable from the sound of the sky tearing itself apart.

“Please, stop,” he forces out, his words feeble and thin. He cannot tell if the man can hear him or not. He should stand, should run or fight or reason, should at the least raise his hands to show his surrender, but he is paralyzed by fear and by the thumping pain in his head, which chooses this moment to return. He is suffocating, he is drowning, overcome by a terrible pressure within and without, as if the sea has found him at last, its icy waters filling his lungs as he struggles to draw breath.

The man looms over him, thunder booming behind him, and then he is bending forward, reaching out again with those big hands, and the terror and pain reaches a breaking point.

“No!” he screams and the pressure snaps.

The house erupts in chaos. Cushions explode, furniture shatters and the wood on the fire bursts into flame as a shockwave is flung from him, knocking both the man and everything in its path away, marked by a ripple in the air tinted green.

He pants in the aftermath, pain and pressure gone, but fear is still a living thing clawing in his chest. _What is happening?_

The man rises to his feet in a smooth motion, rubbing at his chest, and looks thoughtfully at him, but, thankfully, makes no move towards him.

The storm still roars outside but it is strangely muted, as if it were far away. The glass rattles in the pane, raindrops smeared like tears over its surface, but the howling of the wind has faded to a low moan, like someone weeping in the distance. They must be in the heart of the storm.

He can breathe now, and he does so, slowly, and feels his racing heart and mind settle and his wits collect.

“Who are you?” he asks in the peculiar quiet. “What do you want with me?”

“I am Thor,” the man says, voice tight with emotion. “I have come to take you home.”

“I am home,” he says swiftly, gesturing at his ruined house. “And I do not know you. I want you to leave. Now.”

“No,” Thor says, low and final, and his fear spikes again. “I will not leave you here, in this madness. You must come back with me.”

“I want you to go,” he says, voice rising, eyes darting from side to side, looking for escape and finding none. “Go!”

“Loki -” Thor says, advancing again, and he is huge, so huge.

He flinches back and frantically raises his palms. “Please,” he says, “please, don’t hurt me. I am not who you think I am!”

Thor checks. “I will not hurt you,” he says gently. “But tell me, if you are not Loki, then who are you?”

“I -” he stops, colour blooming high in his cheeks. “I do not know.” He had not known his ignorance until now.

Thor looks at him and he looks back, and he feels, for the first time, the strangeness of his life here, the blasted wastelands in his mind. He does not know his name, his family, his history – he cannot recall how he came to be here, where he comes from, who he is.

“I do not remember anything,” he says aloud, the words sour on his tongue. “Who am I?”

The man smiles, faintly. “You are Loki,” he says. “And you are my brother. Please, come home with me.”

“Loki,” he says, trying the weight and feel of it, turning it over in his mouth and mind. Is it familiar?

“Brother,” he tries, a little more hesitantly, but that has no more solidity to it than the name. It is a word, no more, no less.

“Thor,” he says, rolling it between his tongue and lips, feeling the burr of thunder in it. It suits the man well, but beyond that?

“I am sorry,” he says, shaking his head to clear it of his confusion and the awful hope in Thor’s sky-blue eyes. “I do not know you.”

Thor’s smile dims. “Please,” he says, gentleness fraying into desperation, “try harder. It has been so hard to find you.”

He – perhaps Loki, perhaps not – stares at Thor’s handsome face, his golden hair, his distinctive dress. This is not a man easily forgotten, surely, but there is only static and white noise in his mind.

“I do not know you,” he says again, a little sharper. “How can I trust you?”

“You are my brother and I love you,” Thor says, stepping closer again. “If you do not remember anything, is it not just as likely that I am telling you the truth as a lie? Is it not worth taking that chance, to discover who you are?”

“But I am happy here,” he insists. “Alone. I wanted for nothing until you came.”

Thor reaches out to cup his cheek and then the back of his neck, a curiously intimate touch. He shudders under it, but cannot quite decipher why.

“I do not believe that,” he says quietly. “For all you may have chosen to forget me. I know you, Loki. You do not truly want to be alone.”

“I -” he says, shivering under the heat of Thor’s palm, imagining that he can feel that heat spreading through him, thinking that, at last, he feels warm again. “I -”

Thor kisses him, very gently, very softly, and for but a heartbeat: his lips are soft and as warm as his palm, and he feels the warmth saturating him as he breathes him in, feels it chase away the ice in his veins, the cold in his bones, a tide of gold sweeping over him and leaving him tingling and breathless in its wake.

“Never doubt that I love you,” Thor says, the words careful and heavy with meaning.

Loki touches his lips with his tongue.

“Take me home.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Pablo Neruda's poem of the same name


End file.
